Tag Archives: communication

I know I know – I’ve not posted for ages, but I need to start to blog again – so where do I start? As someone said when asked the same question ‘start anywhere’.

So – for a quick post, this caught my eye this week on the BBC where Tesco, a large multinational supermarket was fined for selling half price strawberries contrary to trading standards.

Now I’m no apologist for Tesco but it looks like this was a technicality which they should have known (if that had affected the public buying the things I’m less sure about) but towards the end of the article Tesco said that they were offering ‘training’ to their staff to make sure that this didn’t happen again.

How often do we see this? Someone did not ‘know’ or deliberately did not follow trading rules. To me, this does not appear to be a process fault, just a basic ‘follow the rules’ issue – however, training is seen as the ‘cure all’ and has satisfied the court. This could just be a simple communication piece, because this would probably mean ‘repeating’ the wording of the trading standard clauses. How would they assess that this had been successful? No more prosecutions probably. But as with most of these ‘risk’ issues, by not having prosecutions, does not necessarily mean that people ‘know’ or could demonstrate that they ‘know’ the rules about sales.

So – what type of training do you think people are having? And do you think this would just be head office, who make these decisions, or do you think the staff on the shop floor will be having emergency training? Is it training or communication?